Amaya Vega, PhD student
Department of economics, University College Dublin
Primary Advisor: Dr. Aisling Reynolds-Feighan, Dublin, Ireland
Household Impacts on Mode Choice and Travel Behaviour in the Dublin Region (assigned to theme
In this paper we analyse the effects of household characteristics on commuting and residential mobility for the Greater Dublin Area using a microdata sample from the 2002 Census of Population. We will relate these results to the concentration of households with similar characteristics detected in certain districts of the Dublin region. Residential and workplace location choice has been the focus of several studies following from the pioneering work of Alonso (1964), Mills (1967) and Muth (1969). Most of the restrictive assumptions of the standard urban model have been gradually relaxed over the years in order to achieve a more realistic representation of the location choice. Women’s labour force participation dramatically increased in the last decades and many studies incorporated two-workers households to the standard urban model. Alonso (1980) suggested that wives’ increasing commitment to professional careers will increasingly make central cities the location of choice for the jobs of both spouses and the household residence. Multiple workplace locations were also introduced in the standard urban model with recent empirical evidence has shown that US employment is almost as dispersed as residences. Multinomial logit models have been developed recently to study the impact of two-earner household characteristics on the joint decision on husband and wife’s workplace and residential location. Results from US cities showed that the wife’s commitment to professional career favourably affected the household location in the city rather than in the suburbs. Given the correlation between home and job location decisions, we will model these effects for Dublin region following the econometric framework developed by Romaní et al. (2003) with a commuting and a residential mobility equations. The spatial concentration of specific types of households in certain areas in Dublin will give an additional dimension to these results.
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